Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

ASSOCIATION, PULLMAN, WASH. Mr. Petry. I represent the 174 members of the Whitman County Sportsmen's Association, over 60 percent of whom live in, fish, hunt, or backpack in Idaho. We create a considerable amount of economic benefit in your State and we are highly familiar with its resources. I personally am a full professor of finance and by training and profession have had considerable involvement in wildlife economics. I have had six grants involving fishing economics totaling over $300,000 in the Northwest covering Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. We highly endorse the Great Burn Wilderness Area that has been proposed for the Kelly Creek and Cayuse Creek areas. This is a premiere hunting, fishing, and backpack area. We are highly disturbed that the Forest Service would spend several hundred thousand dollars to survey and stake the area near Cayuse Creek despite enormous public opposition and without having timber stand data or an approved environmental impact statement. We have considerable difficulty understanding why the Forest Service has so much money to develop low-value timber areas in sensitive soils and when the wildlife values are so great. It appears that they have incidental interest in wildlife and view their jobs as primarily timber harvesters. In a period of huge budget deficits, how can we even pretend to justify spending—no, I should say, wasting taxpayer money. If the Idaho congressional delegation allows the travesty that the Forest Service is planning for the Cayuse Creek area, then this will be a vote for corporate welfare. If I were an entrepreneur who owned the Cayuse Creek/Kelly Creek area, the only way I could make much money would be to manage it for recreation. You would go broke managing it for timber. We have lost confidence in the Forest Service's ability to be an objective manager. I personally spent 100 hours analyzing the benefit/cost study they produced for the Cedars unit which is adjacent to the Kelly Creek area of the Clearwater National Forest. The enormous number of errors and unsupported statements caused me to more than question their objectivity, it caused me to wonder about their ability and even their integrity. I have included a copy of my analysis of the Cedars unit for the record. Now, let me just cover a couple of the items in the exhibit. The No. 1 benefit they claim in the Cedars unit was hydro power. You cut down the trees so the water flows down the slopes. The second thing they did is they overstated employment related to logging by 125 percent. They also reclassified large number of logging roads to shift the cost to recreation. And they substantially understated recreation days and projections. And that's right in there. I hope that trust in the Forest Service can be restored, but it won't be by their bull-in-the-china-shop attitude. The Idaho delegation has a well deserved reputation for being fiscally conservative. A good way to further that image and reduce 620 the Federal deficit would be to cut the Forest Service's road-building budget. They obviously have far too much money if they would even propose to put roads into a high quality recreation area.